Quotables on the mediatrical industry

“Democracy, taken in its narrower, purely political, sense, suffers from the fact that those in economic and political power possess the means for molding public opinion to serve their own class interests. The democratic form of government in itself does not automatically solve problems; it offers, however, a useful framework for their solution. Everything depends ultimately on the political and moral qualities of the citizenry.”
-Albert Einstein

“I have advocated for 30 years that, in order to preserve our democracy and protect ourselves against demagogues, we should have courses in schools on how to watch TV, how to read newspapers, how to analyze a speech – how to understand the limitations of each medium and make a judgment as to the accuracy or the motives involved.”
-Walter Cronkite, retired news anchor for CBS television network

“It is no longer enough to simply read and write. Students must also become literate in the understanding of visual images. Our children must learn how to spot a stereotype, isolate a social cliché and distinguish facts from propaganda, analysis from banter, important news from coverage.”
-Ernest Boyer, past president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and former U.S. Commissioner of Education

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.”
-Thomas Jefferson (1807)

“I feel sorry for the man who, after reading the daily newspaper, goes to bed believing he knows something of what's going on in the world.”
-Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.”
-Richard Salent, Former President CBS News

“People always were and always will be foolish victims of deceit and
self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of
some class or other behind the moral, religious, political and social
phrases, declarations and promises.”
-V.I. Lenin

“One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists in either England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it, a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever. I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation is too serious an
alternative, but I think that where it is possible to do work that is satisfactory to man’s constructive impulses without entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account. Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.”
-Bertrand Russell

“The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”
-David Brinkley, American TV network news anchor

“In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
-Justice Black in New York Times v. United States [403 US 713]

“There is no news in the truth and no truth in the news.”
-Russian saying (Russia has two well-known “newspapers,” Pravda and Izvestia. Pravda means “truth” and Izvestia means “news.”)

“The news and truth are not the same thing.”
-Walter Lippmann

“It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”
-Rod Serling

“All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it…

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”
-Adolf Hitler

“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.”
-Joseph Pulitzer

“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn